Ice Age Hunters in Northern Europe

Ice age hunters of Northern Europe, hunting reindeer and elk as well as utilising other food and shelter resources, moved into the periglacial tundras after the last Glacial Maximum, ca 20 000 BP

When hunting reindeer, the band cooperated closely. Their long, thin and flexible darts were launched from a spear thrower or atlatl, which was a lever which allowed the hunters to get a much greater range and force for their shafts. The darts were armed with both flint blades, especially the characteristic shouldered or tanged points of the Havelte type, and with barbed antler harpoons.

Reindeer antler is a strong, tough material, much stronger than, for example, red deer antler, and could be made into harpoon heads which were quite capable of bringing down an adult reindeer with one shot, a good cast blasting a hole through the shoulder blade of the reindeer, and immobilising the joint. This allowed the hunters to close with the animal, and finish it off.

The hunters aimed for the lifeline, a line connecting the heart and the mouth, and any spear which hit in that area would likely drop the reindeer in its tracks.

The animal would be dressed on the spot, with the abdominal cavity cleaned out and left for scavengers, and only the high value parts of the reindeer carried back to camp, with the load distributed amongst the hunting band.

We think of harpoons (that is, barbed bone or antler spear points) as being used for fish and large sea animals such as seals and whales, but they were first developed for reindeer hunting, and only later adapted for use with fish and marine mammals.

Northern Europe about 17 000 BP. The ice-cap has drawn back from all but the northern fringe of Germany, from the greater part of Denmark, and from the coasts of Norway. The sea, swollen by the melting ice, is creeping across the North Sea Plain to meet the Reindeer Hunters, whose summer camps at Meiendorf and Stellmoor may well have been less than 30 miles from the eternal ice.

The darts and spear thrower were carefully made. The head of the spear often had a harpoon carved from reindeer antler instead of a flint point, with the harpoon mounted in such a way that it parted company with the shaft when the reindeer was struck, and there was less chance of either being broken.

The spear thrower gave much greater speed and distance to the spear because of the extra leverage gained.

A broken point or harpoon could be easily replaced in the field, but a dart was a big investment of time and effort, and was difficult to replace when there were few trees around, as was the case in the summer grazing grounds in the tundra.

One big advantage given by the development of the bow and arrow was that the shafts of the arrows were much shorter and thinner than darts, and very much easier to replace.

In addition, instead of just two or three unwieldy spears carried in the hand, dozens of arrows could be carried in a quiver on the back of the hunter, and the bow and arrow combination allowed the hunter to move into position quickly and easily, and to fire multiple shafts in a few seconds.

This is by far the most beautiful display of flint tools I have ever seen. It is a work of art in itself, and a tribute to the staff of the museum.

The Cro-Magnons hunted with light spears thrown with atlatls, propulseurs. Bows and arrows only came later - when is uncertain - but at the end of the Ice Age we find arrow shafts with notches for bowstrings in the Ahrensburg Culture, ca 11 000 BP.

Throwing spears and arrows had sharp flint points shaped according to changing fashions; the soil still contains relics of 10 000 years of hunting - the small arrowheads of flint that made the hunters' weapons so fatally effective.

(left) Trapezoid microliths and an arrow with a trapezoidal microlith used as an arrow tip, found nearly three metres deep in a peat bog at Tværmose, Eising Sogn, Ginding Herred, North Jutland (Denmark).

The chisel-ended arrow was developed and extensively used in ancient Egypt for the shooting of birds

(right) Transverse arrowheads with their hafting still intact are very rare. This one is also from Tværmose near Ringkøbing.

Some of the most well-known flint objects from the Stone Age are arrowheads. They can be found all over Denmark, in places where the Stone Age hunters missed their targets. These have then been discovered thousands of years later; the arrowheads of flint are well preserved, whereas the wooden arrow shafts have decomposed. The so-called transverse flint arrowheads are shaped so that they have a very broad cutting edge.

This is useful when hunting large prey. The broad cutting edge causes severe injuries to the animals, that bleed to death relatively quickly and are unable to move far away from the hunter. Arrowheads are sometimes found which have been exposed to heat. Apparently these have remained lodged in the body of the animal when it was cooked.

( while such composite and complicated points would have required a large amount of effort, skill, and time to complete, the results were obviously worth it.
It would seem to me that they were most likely to be used on larger game such as deer and moose, where the damage done by such an array of very sharp edges would have brought the animal to a standstill very quickly because of shock. - Don )

The tool on the left, apparently a facsimile, appears to be either an adze, or a handled wedge for splitting timber, made from moose /elk antler. Note that the maker has carefully put the hole for the handle at a thickening in the antler, to provide more strength at the junction, where much stress would be applied.

The tool on the right has the appearance of an adze, and may be original.

Towards the end of the Ice Age birch forests grew up. The last refuge of the now-extinct giant deer was the young forest landscape - ideal too for elk (moose) which ate the aquatic plants in the extensive wetlands. Hunters also gathered at the lakes, using harpoons to kill animals trying to swim away. After the quarry had been cut up the bones were sunk in the lake as hunting sacrifices. In a lake at Koelbjerg on Funen a woman drowned 10 000 years ago. She is the oldest known Dane.

This skull of the woman from Koelbjerg on Funen is typically Cro-Magnon. 10 500 BP.

A wounded elk (moose) sank exhausted to the bottom of a lake at Tåderup on Falster 8700 years ago. In 1922 the skeleton was found in a peat bog. Among the bones was a broken bone point that may have been used in the hunt. Later a harpoon was found in the same peat bog.

Several kinds of tools and weapons were made from the large animals' antlers and slender bones. The hunting was so intensive that the species was wiped out in Zealand ca 8500 years ago. However the elk still played an important role in the hunters' mythology. Tooth beads, and tools of elk antler and bone were valuable barter objects.

The Cro-Magnons came to Europe in a mild climatic period. Their settlements were scattered all over central Europe. Slowly the climate got colder. When Ice Age glaciers covered northern Europe around 20 000 BP, man had moved further south. In southern Europe the hunting culture survived the coldest period of the Ice Age. When the climate improved people quickly moved north. Wild horses and mammoths lived on the tundra, but it was mainly reindeer hunting that brought humans to Denmark 14 000 years ago. Here the hunters pitched their tents on windswept hills with a view of the migration routes of the reindeer.

Sea level was still low at the end of the Ice Age, ca 9 000 BP. The Baltic Sea was full of meltwater that ran into the sea via a river in the Øresund. The reindeer had fixed migration routes on the tundra, and the hunters' settlements lay along these routes.

Hamburgian Culture

The Hamburg culture or Hamburgian (15 500 - 13 100 BP) was a Late Upper Paleolithic culture of reindeer hunters in northwestern Europe during the last part of the Weichsel Glaciation beginning during the Bölling Interstatial. Sites are found close to the ice caps of the time.

The Hamburg Culture has been identified at many places, for example, the settlement at Meiendorf and Ahrensburg north of Hamburg, Germany. It is characterised by shouldered points and zinken tools, which were used as burins when working with horns. In later periods tanged Havelte-type points appear, sometimes described as most of all a northwestern phenomenon. Notwithstanding the spread over a large geographical area in which a homogeneous development is not to be expected, the definition of the Hamburgian as a technological complex of its own has not recently been questioned.

The culture spread from northern France to southern Scandinavia in the north and to Poland in the east. In the early 1980s, the first find from the culture in Scandinavia was excavated at Jels in Sønderjylland. Recently, new finds have been discovered at, for example, Finja in northern Skåne. The latest findings (2005) have shown that these people traveled far north along the Norwegian coast dryshod during the summer, since the sea level was 50m lower than today.

In northern Germany, camps with layers of detritus have been found. In the layers, there is a great deal of horn and bone, and it appears that the reindeer was an important prey.
The distribution of the finds in the settlements show that the settlements were small and only inhabited by a small group of people. At a few settlements, archaeologists have discovered circles of stones, interpreted as weights for a tent covering.

Text above: Wikipedia

Numerous reindeer standing on patches of snow during summer to avoid blood-sucking mosquitoes and gadflies. Reindeer migrate to summer pastures not just for the grazing, but to avoid the worst of the insects.

For weeks in the spring, the youngsters in the hunting band had been watching the reindeer in their winter, southern feeding grounds, and now the reindeer became restless, and began to move north to summer pastures. Their excited reports transformed the camp, which had been ready for this for a long time, and within a few hours everything was packed and in readiness for the long trek to the north, following the reindeer.

The reindeer mostly followed much the same path, but that was not always the case, and the life of the hunters was based around reindeer. Their main food was reindeer meat, though they varied it where possible, and their clothing, tools, weapons and tents were totally dependent on the harvest of reindeer.

The route taken by the huge herd of reindeer was easy to follow, but they never let the reindeer get too far ahead. The journey took a long time, but eventually they arrived in the north where the reindeer spread out on the tundra to graze, and the hunters set up camp near a good supply of water such as one of the glacial lakes that dotted the confused drainage of the tundra, and settled in for summer.

The people of the Hamburgian and Ahrensburg culture moved with the herds. Reindeer were their prime sustenance, for food, clothing, hides and weapons. This painting is more slanted to the Ahrensburg culture of Stellmoor, since the Hamburgian culture of Meiendorf mostly used spears thrown by spear throwers, and apparently did not have dogs, and the Ahrensburg mostly used bows and arrows, and had at least partly domesticated the dog. Both were summer camps to hunt reindeer, both were located by small lakes, and the two sites were only separated by 1300 metres.

Both had similar toolkit and cultural practices, including sacrificing the first prime reindeer of the season by sewing rocks in its abdominal cavity, and casting it into the lake. There was one such reindeer at the Hamburgian culture type site at Meiendorf, a site which was probably only used for one season, and more than thirty at the Ahrensburg culture at Stellmoor, a site which was used for a generation.

A reasonable hypothesis is that the Hamburgian culture typified by Meiendorf lasted from about 15 500 to 13 000 BP, and the Ahrensburg typified by Stellmoor existed from about 12 500 to 11 000 BP.

Photo: http://www.pkaj.dk/stellmoor_lokaliteten.asp

Distribution of the Hamburgian and sites associated with the Hamburgian in early Late glacial north-western Europe. Curve Backed Point (CBP) and Magdalenian sites labelled:

On arrival at the summer camp site, which was often the same site as previous years, if the reindeer kept to their traditional path, the hunters erected their tents. If it was in the nearly treeless tundra, near the eternal ice, as was normal, they would have had to have taken the poles for the tents with them, perhaps using them lashed together and dragged behind the trudging men, doing double duty in holding their heavy loads of supplies for the journey, as well as clothes, weapons and tools. When they had served this purpose, they were reused for tent poles.

The camp site was always near a supply of fresh water, and in the confused drainage of the tundra, this was always available in the form of lakes which were ice free in the summer, and which provided a convenient place ( human nature has not changed much, after all! ) to toss all their defleshed bones, unwanted antlers, broken tools, and other rubbish, keeping the campsite itself clean and wholesome - a godsend for archaeologists many thousands of years later.

The first task on arrival was to make a fire, achieved by striking flint on a piece of pyrites, or marcasite, with the resultant sparks falling onto finely pounded willow bark, dried moss, or a fungus such as Fomes fomentarius. The embers thus created were then quickly blown into a fire with fine tinder, then larger diameter wood was added to get the campfire burning well.

Even in the tundra small trees sometimes grow in sheltered positions, but fuel would always have been a problem in these areas. Bone will burn, especially if it is old, dry bone, but it is not an ideal fuel, and is best used in conjunction with whatever wood can be scavenged (Äikäs et al., 2010).

This beautiful art work created by Giovanni Caselli shows them, however, camped beside the sea. Out of sight but close at hand would have been a convenient brook for fresh water.

Drills were used as hand held tools and also hafted onto a handle to make them easier to use. Fine drills at the limit of the technology were needed to make holes in bone or antler needles to make the sewing of clothes easier. After the needles were created by scoring antler, the needles had a hole drilled in them, and were then fined down and rounded in grooves on pebbles of sandstone.

Readers may be interested in the dying stages of the last ice age, when reindeer hunters moved north onto the Scandinavian peninsula following the herds, in the process learning how to follow them across the fiords, and to invent the skin boats and adaptations of the spear and harpoon hunting tool kit necessary for this process, which then allowed them access to a hitherto untapped biome of fish and marine mammals.

This map shows the Baltic Ice Lake just before it joined with the North Sea, and the Vegetation Zones which were extant at that time.

Dalmeri, G., Peresani, M., Ferrari S., 2002: Rise and fall in the utilization of trapezoidal microliths during the late Upper Palaeolithic in Europe : an overview from the italian recordHunters in a changing world : environment and archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (ca. 11000-9000 B.C.) in northern central Europe, Workshop of the UISPP-Commission XXXII at Greifswald in September 2002 / edited by Thomas Terberger and Berit Valentin Eriksen. - P. 243-251 : ill.

More photographs of sites and venuses are always welcome!
If you would like a particular archaeological site to be covered here, if you have questions or comments, or if you have any photographs or information which would be useful for Don's Maps please contact Don Hitchcock at don@donsmaps.com

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